JEREMY Corbyn's plans to blow a £10 billion hole in public finances by scrapping university tuition fees has been condemned by a former Labour education secretary.

Mr Corbyn's plans to scrap tuition fees has been condemned by Alan Johnson

Alan Johnson, a highly respected moderate who has just retired from Parliament, damned the policy as "unaffordable" and suggested it would penalise working class families to subsidise wealthy middle class students.

Mr Johnson, who was also Home Secretary, introduced higher tuition fees when he ran the Department for Education.

He said that his party should remember the fate of the Lib Dems and their former leader Nick Clegg who went into coalition with the Tories having being elected on a pledge to scrap tuition fees.

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It [scrapping tuition fees] is not affordable and in my view it won't happen and we should learn off of Nick Clegg

Alan Johnson

Once it power the Lib Dems discovered it was unaffordable and in fact agreed to treble the level of fees to £9,000 instead.

The result was that in 2015 the party lost all but eight of their 57 seats as voters turned against them for the broken promise on fees.

In an interview with Tim Iredale for BBC Look North, Mr Johnson said: "It [scrapping tuition fees] is not affordable and in my view it won't happen and we should learn off of Nick Clegg."

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Alan Johnson said scrapping tuition fees is not affordable

Taking on the hard Left view of offering freebies for all to win elections, Mr Johnson warned that they were in fact asking the poor to subsidise the well off.

He said: "There is nothing progressive about working people, many of whom will get nowhere near a university, cross-subsidising mainly middle class students to have a completely free higher education."

The proposal is a key bribe being used by the current Labour leadership to younger voters in the hope they will come out in unusually high numbers to tip the balance in the election.

A Press Association projection, using a combination of opinion polls and demographic data from the Office for National Statistics and Electoral Commission, released on June 2 suggested a hung parliament would require a 78 per cent turnout across all ages.

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Nick Clegg went into coalition with the Tories

This projection would see the Conservatives secure 319 seats and therefore be seven short of a majority, with Labour on 243.

But while this showed the possibility of what could happen, estimated turnout among 18 to 24 year-olds was 43 per cent in 2015 compared with 78 per cent for people aged 65 and over.